


Parent Trap

by ChokolatteJedi



Series: Caged Birds [1]
Category: Chuck (TV), White Collar (TV 2009)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Child Neglect, Fake Character Death, Gen, Government Agencies, Jossed, Neal Caffrey & Bryce Larkin Are Twins, Separate Childhoods, Spies & Secret Agents, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-02
Updated: 2011-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28868613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/pseuds/ChokolatteJedi
Summary: Bryce and Neal are two when their mother and father — as they would later call it — Parent Trap them.
Series: Caged Birds [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117112
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Parent Trap

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of handwaving to make the time lines sync like I wanted. Don't think too hard about it ;)

Bryce and Neal are two when their mother and father — as they would later call it — Parent Trap them.

Unable to handle things any more, Steve Larkin quits the Force to take a security job in New Haven, hauling Bryce away with him. When the boys are four, he remarries, and for all intents and purposes, he, Mary, and Bryce live an idyllic white-picket-fence life in Connecticut.

Victoria reverts back to her maiden name, Caffrey, and remains behind in Chicago with Neal. On her good days, she tells Neal stories about his father, a hero cop who had been killed in the line of duty. On her bad days, Neal picks the lock on her bedroom door and brings in a microwaved bowl of soup stolen from the convenience store, placing it beside her hand in the hopes that she will eat it.

When Neal misses too many days — before he is able to confidently walk to school alone — he is forced to repeat first grade. When it becomes apparent that Bryce isn't being challenged enough in school, he is allowed to skip third trade.

In high school, Bryce runs cross country and track and dables in gymnastics. His position as a jock keeps him from getting too much abuse for his other pastimes — computer hacking and nerdy TV shows. He earns full ride scholarships to three different schools, graduates at seventeen, and chooses Stanford for its proximity to both Silicon Valley and Comic-Con.

Neal's first official forgery is a city bus pass, to get him across town to high school every day. He does swim and water polo in PE, but struggles to get to the away meets after hours. He spends his spare time in the library, reading about history and art, and his daily commute pouring his heart out into a stolen sketchbook. When he is sixteen, his mother dies, and rather than join the foster system, Neal runs.

A month after his eighteenth birthday, Bryce meets for the first time with a recruiter for the CIA. A month before his nineteenth birthday (though all his IDs say he is twenty-four), Neal is arrested and sentenced to four years in Supermax.

The CIA discovers the link between Neal and Bryce when the former is arrested, his mugshot plastered all over the papers. The Agency uses the prison infirmary to obtain his DNA for comparison, finds it a match, and then sits on the knowledge. Bryce graduates at twenty, and is assigned a job in New York for the first time at twenty-one. When a small, bespeckled man in a horrible toupee confronts him on the street, asking how he broke out of prison, Bryce's handlers finally spill the beans.

Neal is a little over two years into his sentence when he is suddenly grabbed from the lunch line and thrown into a solitary cell with two unfamiliar guards bracketing the door. Neal is almost twenty-two when he finds himself locked in a room with his mirror image. The CIA has a dossier, explaining the separation and the paths each of their lives took. Bryce feels intensely guilty at how lucky he has been, realizing his incredible privilege to be the Larkin instead of the Caffrey. Neal pretends to feel lucky that he is no one's pet monkey, and buries his resentment as far down as possible. Bryce doesn't judge a single one of Neal's cons or coping strategies, and Neal wonders if this is what it feels like to have a family. They exchange letters weekly from that point onward.

Bryce communicates with Chuck through video game references and Klingon. He communicates with Sarah through body language, predetermined phrases, and Polish. Neal communicates with Mozzie in hypotheticals and misappropriated quotes. He communicates with Kate through poetry, promises, and outrageous gestures. Bryce and Neal communicate in ciphers, historical references, and a little known Greek dialect — Tsakonic — that Neal learned while allegedly casing a museum in Tripoli.

When Neal is six months away from completing his prison sentence, Bryce's handlers start dropping hints about the benefits to having identical genius agents. When Neal is four months away from completing his prison sentence, Bryce manages to pass him a message telling him to run. Neal's apparent instability — risking everything for a girl, — the threat of more prison time, and the FBI's repeated communication with him signal the end of the CIA's interest.

A year later, Bryce makes the hardest choice of his life. In the end, he decides against sending a flash drive to an alleged thief for safe keeping, and throws Chuck to the wolves instead. He has saved each of them once already, and if he only has one more ace in his sleeve he'll use it to protect Neal.

Neal has been back in prison for a day after Kate's death when an anonymous source sends him a newspaper from Washington DC containing the story of a random accountant killed in a bank robbery gone wrong. The fog doesn't lift from his brain for months; everyone thinks it's because of Kate and he doesn't correct them.

It takes Bryce three months to let him know otherwise.


End file.
